The Dude Sings

Who should be excited for the self-titled country album by Jeff Bridges? Let’s see: cult worshippers of “The Big Lebowski” and his indelible lead character, otherwise known as the Dude. Anyone who ever idly imagined a future for Duane, the rangy Texas high school quarterback Mr. Bridges played 40 years ago in “The Last Picture Show.” And what about those moved by his Academy Award-winning portrayal of Bad Blake, the downward-spiraling country veteran in “Crazy Heart”? Sure, them too. Especially them.

“Jeff Bridges,” the album, is hard not to see in a cynical light. Produced by T Bone Burnett, who shaped the sound and mood of “Crazy Heart,” it can look from the outside like a mixture of a vanity project, a brand extension and some kind of fan fiction. When Mr. Bridges sings the line “Am I falling short or do I fly?” in “Falling Short,” one of his own songs, is he evoking a post-redemption Blake? When he sings “I’ve got to get back to the quest,” in “The Quest,” by John Goodwin, is he speaking for himself?

These questions are worth asking precisely because Mr. Bridges has proved to be such a wise and natural presence on screen, and because this album wouldn’t exist otherwise. You may be aware that he has long dabbled in music; that he self-released (with Michael McDonald) a cheery mess of an album in 2000; and that his performances in “Crazy Heart” were genuine.

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Jeff Bridges performing at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles in March 2010.Credit
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

This is all good to know; it assures you that buying “Jeff Bridges” would be less of a folly than ordering a Meryl Streep cookbook. But you may also want to know that rather than playing an album-release show, Mr. Bridges will spend Tuesday night at Lebowski Fest New York, as part of a cast Q. and A.

Mr. Bridges is hardly the first country singer to come across like someone playing a character, of course. And he does carry himself respectably. On “What a Little Bit of Love Can Do” he brings rakish charm to a chorus that might have seemed conceited and belittling. (“There ain’t nothin’ really wrong with you,” he sings. “You just need a little tendin’ to.”)

On “The Quest” and “Maybe I Missed the Point,” both by Mr. Goodwin, he conveys the wry, chastened air of a guy taking stock of his life. But then there’s “Blue Car,” a Greg Brown tune in blues form, which elicits something you’d almost hesitate to call a performance. (Mr. Bridges has sounded more expressive on Hyundai commercials.)

And in general there’s the dusky, reverberant sound of the album, which turns Mr. Bridges into a cog in the T Bone Burnett Americana machine. “Raising Sand,” the album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss that Mr. Burnett produced for Rounder in 2007, had the same sonic tapestry and many of the same musicians. It had better singing, though, even if “Jeff Bridges” enlists backup support from the likes of Sam Phillips, Rosanne Cash and Ryan Bingham, whom you may have heard and seen in “Crazy Heart.”

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As preparation for that film, Mr. Bridges studied with the songwriter Stephen Bruton, who died of cancer shortly afterward. “Nothing Yet,” one of Mr. Bruton’s songs, is a bittersweet highlight here, a ballad of rueful reflection that doubles as the album’s stealth anthem. “Well, I’d like to think that I gave my best,” Mr. Bridges muses. “But I had to learn like all the rest.”

The trumpeter, singer, bandleader and provocateur Leron Thomas, a New Yorker originally from Houston, isn’t making it easy on himself. His records, self-produced and often underproduced, are hard to sum up, and that’s the point.

They’re perverse and searching and sketchy and sometimes quite lovely: straight-ahead jazz — he is a serious improviser, rhythmically strong and controlled in ballads — as well as R&B, tense indie-rock and several kinds of singer-songwriter music. He sings in croons and yelps, making acid commentary about competition between musicians, sexual rituals and everyday treachery, feckless posing, attractions and repulsions, and class and race. Sometimes you don’t know when he’s joking, or what kind of joke he’s making. Sometimes he isn’t joking.

Basically he’s letting the audience come to him. To that end, you can hear all his albums on iTunes now, or order the discs through his Web site, leronthomas.com; they range from the instrumental small-group jazz of “Around You,” to the consolidated songcraft of “Juxtaposed,” to the all-over-the-placeness of “Improvsensation” and the “Dirty Draws” series.

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So on Vol. 3 of that series, we’ve got the leering “What You Need,” with a spaced-out, glamorous atmosphere and sophisticated funk; “Owe It All,” prog-jazz in 6/8 rhythm; “Stadium Lights,” with needling racial commentary in soothing, then sweeping chord changes; “Blush,” a Neptunes-influenced come-on to a complicated woman; “Proverbs,” a foggy, midtempo instrumental ballad with warm, broad trumpet playing and smart rhythmic accents; and “Mr. New York,” about feeling disaffection for a great city. It’s a legit piece of post-cabaret on a big subject, something to file with LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down” and Dave Frishberg’s “Do You Miss New York?”

“Dirty Draws, Vol. 3” is a choppy sprawl stacked with attitude, probably too much to handle in an album; a producer is both what it needs and exactly what it doesn’t need. But in this case, what’s an album? Mr. Thomas is making a case for his work as one long, curious unspooling.

Genres dissolved in the music of John Martyn, a British singer and songwriter who died in 2009 after a career dating back to the 1960s. Modal melodies and intricate guitar-picking linked him to folk songs and blues. His burry, improvisatory vocals and sense of rhythm looked toward jazz. His studio experiments with echoes and distortion verged on psychedelia and electronica. And his lyrics, with their deep-seated melancholy and hard-won benedictions, can speak to the down-hearted anywhere.

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“I wish I could step free/of every weight I ever leaned my weight upon,” he wrote in “Let the Good Things Come,” which opens the tribute album in a version by David Gray that despairs of any such possibility.

So it’s little wonder that a tribute album could draw 30 acts: not only folky types, like Paolo Nutini and the Swell Season, but also Beck, Morcheeba, Snow Patrol and Robert Smith of the Cure, whose echoing guitar turns “Small Hours” into a shimmering anthem.

Unplugged, respectful folkies predominate, some simply doing their best to imitate Mr. Martyn. (Cheryl Wilson is backed by Mr. Martyn himself on guitar.) Others personalize the songs further. Beth Orton, accompanied only by guitar and piano, fills “Go Down Easy” with mournful longing. Beck’s take on “Stormbringer” as somber acoustic folk-rock backed by a string arrangement could have come from his 2002 album “Sea Change,” lyrics and all: “She never looked around to see me/She never looked around at all.”

Like most tribute albums, “Johnny Boy Would Love This” is mixed, with a few misfires, like Snow Patrol’s overblown “May You Never.” But Mr. Martyn’s pensive, moody spirit comes through, and the tribute should send listeners back to his own 1973 masterpiece, “Solid Air.”